The Neatest

1. Look for your snazzy “short” URL that LinkedIn gave you when you customised your profile, and which is displayed just below the photo:

2. Remove the trailing slash from the URL and replace it with #recommendations (or #endorsements)

http://uk.linkedin.com/in/dedicateddba#recommendations

If you have a WordPress blog, you might also want to have a look at the LinkedIn Plugin for WordPress which can be used to display a rotating scroller of your LinkedIn recommendations anywhere on your blog.

The interface will be familiar to anyone who has ever used Photoshop – with full support for multiple layers, retro vintage effects and many common photo editing tools, such as the paint brush, pencil, dropper, lasso and magnifying glass.

The retro vintage editor provides three settings (accessible from the dial), each featuring a side scrolling list of effects, ranging from bubbles, fog and glitter to stylized border shapes. There are many combinations you can try to customize your photos.

Images can be created or uploaded from a computer, URL or an online library.

PureText is a tiny freeware utility written by Steve Miller that I find absolutely invaluable when composing emails and writing documentation. It sits quietly in your windows tray and with a single keystoke will paste the contents of the windows clipboard devoid of any formatting whatsoever.

I can’t begin to count the number of times that I’ve wanted to copy a snippet of text from an email, document or webpage and the resulting formatiing has completely messed up the rest of my email. I’d have to open notepad, paste the text, re-select it and cut it again before I could paste it into my email – what a hassle!

Whilst creating this blog I needed to create an ICO file which would serve as the site’s favicon, but unfortunately there aren’t very many general purpose image editors that have the ability to save images in this format.

As it’s quite rare that I need to create ICO files I really wanted to find a free tool to convert regular image files (such as a JPG or PNG file) into ICO files, but actually found something even more useful.

My image editor of choice for creating or manipulating simple images is Paint.Net and so I was delighted to discover the Icon/Cursor Plug-In developed by Evan Olds. This simple plug-in provides the ability to:

Load a single image from an existing ICO file for editing.

Load all images from an existing ICO file as separate layers for editing.

Save multiple resolutions of an image to an ICO file.

Both Paint.NET and the Icon/Cursor Plug-In are completely free of charge.

The little known tool Search Commands from Microsoft Labs adds a new tab to Microsoft Office that allows you to find commands and options within the Ribbon interface … very useful when you used to know exactly where it was on the old menu based interface, but just can’t find it anymore.